Author: Ben Wahrman

Points of View on A Certain Point of View

Posted on November 3, 2017by , , , , , and Not A Committee

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Jay: So guys, we’ve had a chance to digest From A Certain Point of View for a little while. This was always an interesting project — a book commemorating the 40th Anniversary of A New Hope, but trying to avoid well-trod ground. It was a huge undertaking to get 43 authors involved, and even more so to accomplish all of that for a charitable cause. Here at Eleven-ThirtyEight, we’ve been extolling the virtues of short stories for a while — both as a way to introduce new authors into the mix and to experiment with different kinds of stories. After all, I think several of us would agree that there is no one right way to tell a Star Wars story — that we can think beyond the expectations of Jedi, space battles, past tense, all of that, and get something different that still feels very much like Star Wars (the original movie was, after all, experimentation based on the familiar).

FACPOV gave us that — and it gave us a large variety of stories, catering to various different perspectives and interests. I’m sure that between all of us, there was at least one story that we knew we’d love as soon as Del Rey announced the story subjects. But what I want to get into first is…what surprised you? We’ll have time to talk about expected favorites later, but for me part of the joy was finding several stories I never expected to be my favorites, but they were. Was it the same for you?

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Rebels Revisited: The Natural Conclusion

Posted on November 1, 2017by Feature Articles

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The common parlance (taken, of course, from a line the first film and applied liberally by fans) for the period between the fall of the Republic in Revenge of the Sith and the rise of the Rebellion in A New Hope is “the dark times”. This is when the Empire is at its zenith, with the Jedi long dead and any other opposing forces deep underground to avoid being summarily crushed. For many, especially when Star Wars Rebels was first announced, having a kid-friendly show about the adventures of a precocious teenager set in a time that should be the hallmark of an oppressive authoritarian regime was a perfect example of the “Disney-fication” of Star Wars as a whole. A show like Rebels, with such a light, comedic tone, would never be able to properly show the extent of the Empire’s oppression.

How easy it is to forget that when the Rebels media blitz was getting revved up and the series itself was finding its sea legs, we got a glimpse of the future, of how the show would handle that very subject. Various supplemental sources, like the Servants of the Empire series, hinted that the Empire was going to start to strip-mine Lothal for its natural resources, turning it from its idyllic pastures and rolling hills into yet another cog in the Imperial war machine. As Rebels itself left Lothal in the second season, we lost sight of that vision a bit. On periodic return visits, everything seemed relatively fine aside from the gradually increased Imperial presence, though sources outside of the show like the Thrawn novel touched back on the planet’s mining riches as general background.

Now, though, after the time-skip between the second and third seasons of the show, we’ve finally returned to Lothal proper in “The Occupation”. We go back to familiar locales first glimpsed all the way back in the show’s pilot shorts, now seeing the wind-swept McQuarrie-inspired grassland covered in heavy industrial smoke and dust. We hear that the friendly Ithorian bartender Old Jho, an early ally featured across multiple episodes of the show and even some of the books, was evicted from his establishment and summarily executed by the Empire for treason. The once-friendly locals don’t even dare brave the streets after dark anymore, with all motorized transports impounded and Imperial patrols everywhere. Lothal may have been under Imperial rule before, but now it is under true Imperial occupation, with all efforts being taken to stamp out any further potential rebellion. Read More

Rebels Revisited: For Mandalore – The Escalation of Drama and Subversion of Expectations

Posted on October 18, 2017by Feature Articles

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Full disclosure: I had part of the idea for this article in mind after having seen the first of this duology at Star Wars Celebration Orlando in the spring. My expectations for the second episode, then, were a bit colored by having to wait six months for the next bit of the story to finally be revealed. A cruel, cruel man is Dave Filoni, giving Celebration attendees the first of a two-parter as a special sneak preview and leaving us with one of the cruelest cliffhangers in any Star Wars media that I have personally consumed.

There will, of course, be many, many spoilers for both episodes of the “Heroes of Mandalore” two-parter coming up ahead. Only proceed if you’ve already watched the episodes for yourself, it’s well worth the events hitting you fresh.

Star Wars Rebels has always been a very serialized show, with heavy continuity and character development from episode to episode and season to season drawing the viewer ever deeper into the stories of the main cast. This duology serves as a climax, of sorts, for Sabine’s story. While she’s guaranteed to return throughout the remaining season as a member of the ensemble, this is the climax of the arc that’s been building since the show’s first season, when we first glimpsed this extremely talented, yet highly unorthodox, Mandalorian girl. Read More

Here Today, Gone Trevorrow: JJ Abrams Returns to Land the Plane

Posted on September 15, 2017by , , , , , and

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I don’t like for this site to do instant-reaction pieces very often because I want us to be measured at all times, and focused on the big picture rather than the heat of the moment. But sometimes an announcement comes along that’s so vaguely detailed that there’s nothing particularly informed or complex we as fans are in a position to say about it—so it’s either offer up our first impressions for what they are, or ignore it entirely.

But how could we possibly ignore something as big as the news that JJ Abrams will be returning to the franchise to direct Episode IX after Colin Trevorrow was put on a bus out of town? With most directors, Trevorrow and even Rian Johnson included, you can speculate a great deal about what their version of a Star Wars film would look like based on their other work, but Abrams is the only working director who has an actual Star Wars film already under their belt that we can pick apart for clues as to what he’ll do next. [1]Yes, I’m excluding Lucas—let the guy retire.

That said? I’m reasonably agnostic on this choice. I love The Force Awakens even more two years later than I did when I first saw it, so I’m completely certain he can produce another Star Wars film that I enjoy. But Star Trek Into Darkness (while I don’t hate it as much as many do) wasn’t anywhere near as good as his first Trek film so I’m not quite convinced he’s the kind of director who gets better at a given property with practice—TFA could very well be his high-water mark.

I also wonder how he’ll cooperate with Lucasfilm this time around; Bad Robot had a pretty heavy hand in TFA because LFL was still largely getting their shit together and figuring out how they wanted to do things—their trust in him was rewarded that time, but with a more firmly ensconced Story Group and a president who knows what she wants and isn’t screwing around, is he willing to accept more “outside” input this time around? Is he willing to take chances of his own? I hope so.

Since Abrams is such a known quantity in this fandom, I’ll make this a little more challenging for the rest of you—if you’re generally positive about this news, what’s the thing that most concerns you? And if you’re generally negative, what are you most optimistic about? Read More

 

References
↑1 Yes, I’m excluding Lucas—let the guy retire.

Second Look: Mandalorians in Rebels – From Traviss to TCW and Back Again

Posted on July 11, 2017by

Second Look is Eleven-ThirtyEight’s biannual tradition of highlighting some of our most interesting pieces from recent months. Every day this week you’ll find a different older piece back on our front page for another moment in the spotlight. – Mike, EIC

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Ever since Boba Fett first graced screens, whether you count the Holiday Special or The Empire Strikes Back as his debut, the Mandalorian visage, that “T”-shaped visor, all-encompassing armor and jetpack with weapons strapped across every extremity, has intrigued people. From that initial appearance, with as little time spent on him as there was, a whole subculture of the Star Wars fandom grew, even before anyone really knew or codified exactly what “Mandalorian” meant. It was the mystery that drew people in, the very Star-Wars-fan idea of taking something that looked cool and sounded cool and latching on to it, filling in the gaps in the existing storytelling with our own ideas.

Since then, there have been several waves of Mandalorian backstory fleshed out, both canon and not, but there has been a main, consistent drive through almost all of them: a warrior culture. In the grand tradition of dozens of other fantasy and sci-fi franchises, the Mandalorians became a Proud Warrior Race, with honor, a clan-based social hierarchy, and a thirst for battle as the cornerstones of their society. This led to problems, of course, because what little we know of Boba Fett showed a man very different from that, and the idea of him being an outlier or social outcast was established early on.

Thus, Mandalorian culture left him behind and continued to grow and evolve through its different portrayals, typically in novels and comics. But things did not really start taking off until Jango Fett, Boba’s father, came onto the scene in Attack of the Clones. In establishing Jango’s backstory, the ideas of Mandalorian terrorist groups like the Death Watch, who took the ideals of their culture to their most violent extremes, and of more honorable groups like the Protectors, were first really presented. Also, and just as important in the long run, was the ideal of family.

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